Friday, 29 March 2013

What's in a name?

At Britain Yearly
Meeting this year, we are being asked to consider 'trusting in Quaker
Trusteeship'. We are told that because we are a charity we have
certain legal obligations and we must have trustees who must do
things in certain ways.

Before the
Enlightenment, people believed, as they still do in many parts of the
world, that to find the right name for something was to be able to
control it. Names had visceral power, and naming and cursing were
dangerous activities. In our sophisticated civilisation we think that
we are rational and know that names are mere labels. But we are
mistaken. Research reported by CommonCause shows that the way we name things subconsciously 'frames'
the way we think about them and value them (or otherwise). A report
here
illustrates this with the use of economic language – the
differences that happen, tested in controlled experiments where only the names
are chnged. For instance when we call people 'consumers' rather than
'citizens', positive emotions tend to be associated with
materialistic values, such as wealth, image and success.

Calling people
'trustees' has unwittingly trapped us in certain modes of thinking.
We have 'framed' our thoughts and don't realise that there is a whole
world outside the frame. I believe that this has also happened in our
meeting here in Sheffield. Rather than the more normal 'Premises and
Finance' committee, we have a 'Management' committee, and rather than
employ a 'warden' we employ a 'manager'. This has trapped us in
hierarchical and controlling ways of working despite our testimony to
equality. I wish that our meeting house business was a workers
cooperative and we got rid of special roles for 'management', This is especially so when my wife, Chriss, who works at our meeting house,
arrives home frustrated and sometimes angry.

Many people I talk to
say we should not be a charity because charity law imposes structures
on us that are against our testimony. In fact, in financial matters
and care of resources our Quaker integrity makes demands on us beyond
any law: we should not be conforming to the law, we should be
surpassing it, and, where needed, demanding changes to the law, as we
have done for gay marriage. Instead we seem to cow before the law,
and fear the Charity Commissioners and feel that we have to conform
to secular ways to satisfy them. The truth is that the work that
'trustees' do in the most part still needs to be done somewhere by
someone. Where has our testimony to integrity gone and why aren’t we trusting the
spirit?

What being a charity
and calling a group of us 'trustees' has done, in my view, is to
expose the ever creeping instrumentalism in Quaker work and
organisation. The adoption of 'management speak', of ever more
'framing' in economic terms, of the veneration of 'experts'. We
think that because we are Quakers we will not be infected by the ways
of the world, but we have a 'Framework for Action', which many
people, myself included, have found highly problematic. So we think
that we can now tell where the spirit comes from?

We do need to explore
how to be effective and use our resources wisely. We have to keep the
name 'trustees' if we are going to remain a charity. But working out
what 'Quaker Trusteeship' might be is fraught with problems, not just
because 'Quaker' can mean just about anything, but because 'Quaker'
refers to our values and relationships rather than to our
organisation. I suggest that we explore 'Cooperative Trusteeship', to
reinforce modes of association that are non-hierarchical and lead to
equality rather than control. This is a debate that also needs to happen
in the cooperative movement, since many co-operatives are or want to
be charities, and vice-versa, so we can find common cause with like
minded people, which will strengthen our analysis.

As for where we place
our trust: we trust the spirit, that spirit that informs our
testimonies to integrity and equality – we need to believe in people, not structures and
names.

I hope that the
debate about 'Trusteeship' will be a wake up call for our society. We
are constantly at the mercy of the Zeitgeist. In the 19th
century we fell for evangelicalism, in the 20th century
for idealism, and now in the 21st century for
managerialism.

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth:
so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” John 3:8, KJV